Nintendo May Not Have Used A Pirated Super Mario Bros. ROM For Wii VC

Back in January 2017, Engadget ran a story that Nintendo downloaded a pirated copy of Super Mario Bros. from the Internet to sell to consumers as part of the Wii Virtual Console catalog.

Ever since that story ran, many believed it was true, even calling out Nintendo as hypocrites in their fight against piracy. To be fair, the company has never said that the allegations in the story were true – all they said was they have never ripped ROMs off the Internet.

Today, a new discovery has been made that could prove Nintendo did not download a ROM off the Internet to resell to consumers. According to ResetERA user KrvaviAbadas, this all ties back to Tomohiro Kawase.

Tomohiro Kawase was one of the developers who worked on the iNES emulator, as well as the format that helped the emulator to run NES games. It appears Kawase went on to work at Nintendo to implement ways of playing classic games on Nintendo hardware and software.